DS9 receives its first visitor from the other side of the wormhole: a very curt alien of reptilian appearance. Appearing on their side with a damaged ship, he very reluctantly agrees to be tractor beamed in for repairs. O'Brien, being resident Mr Fix It and the one who seems able to converse most easily with him, is sent aboard his ship.
The alien identifies himself as Tosk, though he doesn't clarify whether that's his name or his species. With repairs on Tosk's ship scheduled to take a few days, Miles decides to show his new friend around Deep Space 9. But Tosk is hiding something. When he's alone, his first action is to scan for where the weapons on station are stored.
Sisko and the others are unsure of what to make of Tosk. The alien simply wants to leave, and he won't reveal who attacked him or why he's running. Answers soon come when Odo and his security contingent catch Tosk trying to break into the weapons storage. After he's detained in a holding cell, another contingent of residents of the Gamma Quadrant come through the wormhole and beam onto DS9 to stage a surprise attack.
After a brief firefight with the crew, the invaders locate Tosk and reveal they are hunters. Tosk is their prey. To the crew's surprise, Tosk is a willing participant in the hunt. His kind hold a position of great honor, and he considers his life as quarry to be the most grand adventure possible.
Miles tries getting Tosk to seek asylum with the Federation, but he can't think of it. As a Tosk, his lot is to die with honor. But the hunters are displeased that their hunt has come to an anticlimactic end. Finding Tosk caged, they decide that he is not worthy of the honor of being killed. Instead, he will be returned home alive and kept caged, surviving on scraps of food thrown by mocking bystanders, the greatest shame a Tosk can endure.
With the Prime Directive tying his hands, Sisko has no choice but to let Tosk's people take him. But Miles isn't having any of it. After a brief stop by Quark's, he decides to change the rules of this hunt. He lures the hunting party leader into a powered-up weapons detection field and follows it up by cold-cocking him for good measure. Then he stages a prison break and leads Tosk into the station's duct work. Odo seeks to pursue them, but Sisko insists there's no rush.
Miles and Tosk fight their way through DS9's corridors, defeating the hunting party and getting Tosk back to his ship. Tosk leaves DS9 with his honor restored to resume his role as quarry. The hunters leave a little sore but appreciative that the hunt is back on.
This episode provides examples of:
- Agree to Disagree: As much as he doesn't like it, Sisko concedes that it's not his place to pass judgment on this game the hunters are playing... provided it doesn't interfere with business on the station. As a compromise, their captain agrees to keep the Alpha Quadrant off-limits for future hunts to avoid any further incidents.
- Bond One-Liner: A non-fatal example for O'Brien after cold-cocking the leader of the Hunters:"Glass jaw. Now I know why you wear helmets."
- Chekhov's Gun: The weapon sensor at the airlock. At first, it activates an alarm as O'Brien walks through with his phaser. Later, O'Brien intentionally increases its output so it will stun the hunters as they pass through. This weapon sensor never appears before or since this episode.
- Competitive Balance: There seems to be quite a bit of this at play with the hunt. The hunters have advanced weapons and armor, but Tosk is stronger and faster than any of them. Tosk can turn invisible, but the hunters have limited means of seeing through it. The hunters have numerical superiority, but Tosk can go much longer than most humanoids without food or rest. As the hunt is a sport, it makes sense that they would make it as balanced as possible.
- Death Seeker: A Tosk's greatest glory is to die after providing a thrilling hunt for his pursuers.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: A great deal of the episode is about the clash of values between the two sides. To Starfleet, the hunt looks like a barbaric blood sport, but to the Hunters, it's entertainment. Neither is Tosk the victim he seems to be, and flatly refuses to consider seeking asylum when O'Brien suggests it. The lead Hunter directly explains to Sisko that Tosk isn't some kind of condemned criminal being hunted for mere sport - people like him are lauded as national heroes in their society for making the Hunt possible, a central part of their culture/religion (so long as they never let themselves get captured alive...)
- Doesn't Like Guns: Odo states this preference in this episode.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Sisko tells Tosk he's travelled "over 90,000 light-years" by travelling through the wormhole - which would be almost impossible, as the Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years across, and Earth (which isn't that far from DS9) is about 25,000 inward from the edge of the galaxy. Later episodes consistently retconned it to a more reasonable 70,000 light-years.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Despite Quark's objections, O'Brien repeatedly does this.
- Exact Words: When Tosk first comes on board the station, O'Brien casually asks about the damage to his ship's hull, which appears to have been shot at. Tosk replies that the passage through the wormhole was very rough. As O'Brien later observes, this wasn't actually a lie — he never said the rough passage caused said damage.
- Fate Worse than Death: For a Tosk, being captured alive is the ultimate dishonor. The hunter's description of what will happen to Tosk triggers a serious "Oh, Crap!" face.Hunter: For this dishonor, you'll endure the greatest humiliation Tosk can know: to be captured and brought home alive. You will live out your existence on public display where children can make fun of you, toss you scraps of food, which is more than you deserve.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The Tosk hunt. It crosses into Let's Meet the Meat territory, since the Tosk wants to be hunted.
- Implacable Man: Thanks to their advanced armor, the Hunters can take hits from Federation and Bajoran phasers and only be knocked down for a couple seconds, even being able to deflect phaser fire entirely with their gauntlets. They seem much more vulnerable to their own weapons, though, and without their armor they go down pretty quickly to a solid punch to the face, as O'Brien notes in his Bond One-Liner above.
- Invisibility: Tosk can turn invisible at will, allowing him to escape the hunters.
- Lizard Folk: Tosk has a green and scaled appearance, making him look like a rather thick-set lizardman.
- Mythology Gag: Bashir suggests that Tosk might speak to him because people open up to doctors. In the original TOS pilot "The Cage," Dr. Boyce gets Pike to open up by pouring him a drink and saying "sometimes, a man'll tell his barkeep things he'll never tell his doctor."
- No Name Given: Neither Tosk (who may not have a name at all) nor his hunters are called by name.
- No Sense of Personal Space: When Tosk is curious about someone, he has a habit of walking straight up to them and examining them closely from a few centimeters away.
- Punished for Sympathy: Downplayed. In the denouement Sisko chews out O'Brien for helping Tosk escape, but there's a clear subtext that Sisko is only doing it for appearance's sake.
- Read the Fine Print: The "Ferengi print" in Quark's contracts actually required that his dabo girls put up with his sexual advances. Of course, once Commander Sisko hears of this...Sisko: I'm not a legal expert either, but I can assure you, after I talk to Quark, he won't hold you or anyone else to this provision concerning the exchange...
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: O'Brien breaks a lot of rules by helping Tosk escape, but justifies it by pointing out that both sides were unhappy with how things had turned out. Sisko gives him a major tongue lashing anyway, though it's clear he doesn't really mean it, since he intentionally held back security from responding when it happened.
- Straight Man: Tosk is notoriously lacking in a sense of humor, leading Miles to describe him as a natural straight man.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: Tosk is able to locate the weapons locker using a computer terminal in his quarters, without so much as a "that information is classified." Particularly notable as, only one episode prior, Quark needed fake security credentials just to find out where the replicators in the crew's quarters were located.
